Monthly Archives: May 2009

When Is A Blog Not A Blog?

Posted on Saturday, May 30, 2009 by Robin Bloor

I’ve been writing this blog for about a year and a half and if you count the other bloggish posts I used to make to IT-Director.com you could say Ive been blogging for 4 years. I started to do the developer side of blogging as a matter of self-education. I was beginning to believe that my knowledge of the nuts and bolts of programming had atrophied and it needed revitalizing.

I was also busy on other things – like earning a living. Anyone who tells you that blogging is a swift way to earning money is someone with something to sell, which I’d advise you not to buy. Nevertheless, I did put advertising on this blog as a tribute to Tyr, the Norse god, who was bold and brave and not too bright. I intend over the next year or two to try to earn a pittance or more from blogging, rather than just continue willy nilly.

I became convinced of the wisdom of doing this by the dramatic growth in traffic that came with my posting 10 words you don’t know. That posting and others of the same ilk are collectively generating hundreds of visits per day to this site. But this site is not about the use of obscure words, so I need to set up another site and divert the traffic.

That and the fact that I ought to use this site as a marketing arm for some of what I do, means that I’m about to make some changes. To be more precise, I’m about to split this site into several web sites – I’ve not yet decided how many, but basically it makes no sense to mix some of the things that get mixed together on this blog. It’s better to have separate web sites for them:

There’s a genuine conundrum here that I don’t think anyone has dealt with effectively yet, which is the difference between a blog and a web-zine and webbook and a wiki.Here’s what I think each of these is:

  • Blog: Opinion pieces written frequently that have relevance to the day week or month, but little more. A blog, as such is a diary.
  • Webzine: This has articles including comments that are relevant and might veen be relevant for a whole year, but gradually fade in relevance over time.
  • Weboevre: I’ve had to invent this term because there is none appropriate, but think of a book as something that can have a reading life of decades and then imagine a writer gradually accumulating web books on a specific website.
  • Wiki: This is a living encyclopedia dedicated to a given topic where the topic is evolving.
  • WebGallery: This is a collection of art work, including wallpapers for download perhaps.
  • Etail: The etail outlet with download capabilities

The problem I have is that I create content that could be classified as belonging to each one of these categories, except the last and I mix it up into a single blog. That’s not useful for the reader. Consequently I intend to change it by setting up several web sites, keeping HaveMacWillBlog.com as a blog, creating a site for my articles (which will be RobinBloor.com) except for the amusing stuff, which will have a site called WordsYouDon’tKnow.com and there will be a few other sites.

Doing this will make life slightly harder for me in the short term, because I’ll have to build these sites. But it will make it easier in the long term, because I’ll set them up using  similar templates and I’ll automate them.

To answer the faux riddle; when is a blog not a blog.

When it becomes a dumping ground for everything you write.

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Will Bing be Microsoft's OS/2?

Posted on Friday, May 29, 2009 by Robin Bloor

It’s a simple question really. But there’s a big difference in context. In the 1980s Microsoft was collaborating with IBM to jointly build OS/2 which intended to be the future of the PC. At some point down the road Microsoft realized that it didn’t really need IBM and it had no intention of becoming part of IBM’s business model. IBM was expecting OS/2 to become a complement to all the other IBM operating systems. By the time that Microsoft said farewell to OS/2, IBM was starting to flounder in the PC market. It had lost the plot. Nevertheless it kept going with OS/2 and even spent considerable dollars on promoting the doomed Warp edition of the software.

Bing

So fast forward about 15 years and we see a similar scenario. The protagonists this time are Microsoft (the giant) and Google, (the upstart.) Google is strangling Microsoft’s money-losing search business and Microsoft is now valiantly making a full frontal attack on Google with its new search site (opening June 3rd) called Bing.  There’s a $100 million ad campaign that’s going to support it and attempt to drive traffic.

Let’s look at this bit by bit:

  • Bing: This is a really good name for a web site. Microsoft seemed to have mislaid the marketing savvy it once had, but there’s no denying this is a very good brand name – and brand names matter in the search business. If you can’t even remember the name of a search site it’s over. Microsoft is even talking in terms of Bing becoming a word like “Google” did, but that’s beyond dreaming, it’s delusional. A xerox is still a xerox despite the success of Canon and Ricoh. A hoover is still a hoover despite Dyson’s success.
  • A Cleaner Interface: Google has been gradually compromising its interface and search results for the sake of revenue for quite a while now.
  • Capability: We’ll all discover what Microsoft has up its sleeve soon enough, but the capability that it is currently headlining, ahead of the launch, is that it will do much better on subsetting (breaking down results into groups to help you in the next step of your search) and I suspect it will. Any capability in this area is likely to be an improvement over Google. Microsoft is about to learn that an improvement over Google doesn’t matter a damn because if it shows any sign of making a difference Google will copy whatever Microsoft has done. It needn’t even be in a hurry. OS/2 had capabilities that Windows never had for years but it made no difference. The simple fact is that there’s no killer functionality that anyone can add to search – just marginal improvement on Google.
  • BING: Bing Is Not Google. Some wag has already suggested that Bing stands for But It’s Not Google. And that’s the real problem that Microsoft faces. There are thousands of people that could switch to Open Office from Microsoft Office at almost no pain to themselves, because the interface is so similar,  and they’d pay nothing for the switch, but few did, because it wasn’t Office. It may have walked like a duck and squawked like a duck, but it was just a goose with laryngitis. If Bing starts out better than Google and even remains better than Google for several years, it’s too late. When IBM finally realized it had to stop Microsoft, it was already too late. The same looks to be true of Google. It’s not the search engine anymore, it’s the fact that people are just too hooked in to Google to change. Like me, with iGoogle, Gmail, Google Voice, Google Maps and Google Apps. They walk in lockstep with the Search, just like Word and Excel and Powerpoint walked in lockstep.

If you haven’t yet done so, you can take a look at a Bing video to get an impression of the site, but you only have to wait a few days before it’s available. In fact it may already be available as you read this. I will be using it. Just as I used WolframAlpha for a week. Wolfram Alpha, by the way, never even got traffic as high as Ask.com – but it’s in a different market (see Will WolframAlpha challenge Google?) It’s hard to know yet how big that market is and whether Wolfram Alpha is a permanent significant fixture on the web. Bing will start out with a jump in traffic from those, like me, who like to try new things. While the ad campaign runs it will probably do well too. But after that it’s hard to see it keeping whatever traffic it wins. It will be too hard for most people to kick the Google habit, even if it’s worth kicking.

Bing looks like it could be Microsoft’s OS/2.

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Kickfire Kicks Above Its Weight

Posted on Wednesday, May 27, 2009 by Robin Bloor

I briefed with KickFire recently and talked my way through the benchmark shown in the picture below. It’s worth commenting on. KickFire, in case you didn’t know, is data warehouse technology delivered as an appliance. It uses the MySQL database as it’s underlying database technology, but the truth is that it does a good deal of compression so it tends to consume less storage than a vanilla implementation of a traditional relational database.

If you’re familiar with fast database technology you can bracket KickFire with Vertica and GreenPlum, both of which are optimized for data warehouse speed, but KickFire is a little different to those for two reasons:

  • It is an appliance.
  • It isn’t aimed at the VLDB (Very Large Data Base) market. It’s aimed at the QLDB (Quite Large Data Base) market.

The sweet spot for this technology is in the up-to-6TB market, where it kicks sand in the face of the traditional database giving query responses that are at least on order of magnitude faster (i.e. 10x) but range up to and above two orders of magnitude faster (i.e. 100x).

Where does the performance come from?
There are are two distinct areas of acceleration over the normal database:

  • KickFire is a column store implementation (like Sybase IQ, Vertica, Paraccel, etc.)
  • KickFire has a purpose specific chip with SQL burned into the silicon.

If you ask KickFire what each of these technical features give you, then they’ll attribute 10x to the chip and a further 10x to the column store database approach.

The Benchmark
I’m no great believer in benchmarks, but query based benchmarks have greater credibility. What we see here is a comparison with data warehouse benchmarks, using Oracle on HP hardware and Microsoft SQL Server on IBM hardware. Ignoring KickFire for the moment, the Microsoft solution has the preferable TCO, but that’s down to product cost which is often not the deciding variable. What’s interesting about KickFire, apart from the fact that for 300GB databases it clearly comes in at a fraction of the price for roughly the same response times, is that it consumes so little space in the data center (less than one tenth of the space) and it consumes so little electricity (one twentieth or better).

[SinglePic not found]

This is the first time that I’ve noticed data center stats like that appear on a benchmark, but it makes obvious sense – especially when some data centers are reporting electricity costs as a high proportion of amortized hardware costs. I don’t happen to know whether these costs are factored in to the 3 Yr TCO figure. I doubt it because data center space and electricity costs are not standard across the  globe or across the US.

The Bottom Line
The bottom line is that KickFire offers a relatively inexpensive start point for the medium-size company that wants to get started in data warehouse of the larger company that might be able to migrate to this technology. The reduced cost of ownership is compelling.

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Why The Corporate Server Market Is In Terminal Decline

Posted on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 by Robin Bloor

The recession has coincided with a decline in the sale of servers masking the fact that selling servers is no longer the excellent business it once was. According to IDC, 2008 global server revenue fell 3.3 percent to $53.3 billion, although unit sales increased by 2 percent. This masks the declines of the fourth quarter which is when the recession began. In that quarter:

  • High-end enterprise server sales fell 7.5 percent.
  • Midrange enterprise server demand fell 14.5 percent
  • Volume (i.e. commodity) systems revenue fell 16.8 percent year-on-year

This pattern will undoubtedly repeat in the next quarter (figures not yet in) and beyond. The simple fact is that Moore’s Law has finally caught up with the server business.

Virtualization Did It, In Collusion with Moore’s Law

You’ll notice that the decline in sales of high-end servers and midrange servers is less than the decline in sales of commodity servers, which is what you’d expect. In fact difference gives us a rough rule of thumb to judge what is happening. The decline in sales due to the recession is probably close to the 7.5% decline of high end servers. High end servers are much more efficient in their management of resource and the fall off in sales revenues there probably correspond to a decline in commercial activity. The decline in mid-range servers and commodity servers is too high to be explained in that way and is undoubtedly a gift from Moore’s Law delivered via virtualization.

The inefficiency of commodity servers is almost legendary. It just isn’t a surprise any more to hear of data centers where the average server utilization is 5-10%. Virtualization, using software from VMware or Citrix can increase that percentage significantly and when it does it eliminates the need to buy more servers especially commodity servers. Let’s do some math here:

Say you have a data center with 1000 servers and, in a consolidation exercise using virtualization you reduce the number of servers required to 750.

That’s normally achievable since, on average half the servers in a data center are running inefficiently. So now you have 250 spare servers. But on average you replenish data center servers, say, every 3 years. So you will still need to buy servers but instead of 333, you now only need about 250 and you may not need that many because you may be able to use some of the 250 redundant servers rather than sell them on eBay. So your server consumption has dropped by 30 percent.

This won’t happen all at once, because consolidation projects take time. There’s also the possibility that you’ll need new servers for new applications (like Voice over IP, maybe). There may be some underlying server growth – even in a recession.

Now let’s introduce the cloud into the equation and let’s suggest that, in the medium term, the cloud will pretty much eat up the underlying server growth in the data center. Then you’re left with the possibility, which I regard as a likelihood, that the server market in the corporation stagnates.

The Bottom Line

The more I think about this, the more I have to conclude that the corporate server market is in terminal decline. Indeed it looks like it’s caught between a rock and a hard place. Innovation will only make servers more efficient or have a neutral effect, because they offer better power management, say. The only thing that could save the situation would be compelling new applications, but they will almost certainly be delivered from the cloud.

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The Frankenstein Delusion

Posted on Sunday, May 24, 2009 by Robin Bloor

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was originally titled Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. The elevator pitch on Prometheus is that he stole fire from the gods and gave it to man – so he was punished accordingly. The detailed myth is a little more involved than that.

The Genesis of Frankenstein

Prometheus was one of the gods. He had a decent lineage, being the son of the Titan, Iapetus, by Themis and brother to both Atlas (the god of Google maps) and Epimetheus. In Greek, Prometheus literally means forethought, while Epimetheus means hindsight. Prometheus is normally depicted as ingenious, and he was certainly a whiz with DNA, because he created man from clay. When the animals were created, Epimetheus, who was not the smartest god in the pantheon, was charged with bestowing qualities upon them. By the time Prometheus had finished his genetic engineering of man, the bag was empty and Epimetheus had nothing left to bestow. So Prometheus, with a little bit of grafting, cloning and splicing, moulded man in the image of the gods. To add insult to injury as far as Zeus was concerned, Prometheus also stole fire from Mt Olympus and gave it to man.

Prometheus was punished by being strapped to a mountain peak to be visited by an eagle every day who pecked out his liver. Being immortal, his liver grew back over night, only to be eaten again the following day. This would still be a regular ritual if Heracles hadn’t happened by and shot the eagle with an arrow.

If you want, you can argue that the fire of the gods is lightning and thus Dr Frankenstein’s re-animation techniques owe a great deal to the influence of Prometheus. But Mary’s Shelley’s Promethean theme is about creating life, with the added twist that what you create ends up destroying you – not because Zeus has simply had enough of your behavior, but because you’re as dumb as Epithemius and didn’t program the monster to leave you alone when it felt a little murderous.

The Nerd Rapture

All of which brings me to what has been described as the “nerd rapture” – the day when artificial intelligence exceeds the intelligence of man. When that happens, computers will start designing themselves, putting IBM and Hewlett-Packard out of business and possibly even impacting Apple’s market – although no-one really believes that artificial intelligence will ever be capable of designing an iMac.

At that point in time, according to the epithemian futurologist Ray Kurzweil, a singularity occurs. The projected date for that event is 2030. It’s hard to imagine what that will mean, but think of it like this. In 2030 Moore’s Law ends and Kuzweil’s Law takes over. Computer intelligence doubles every month. In a few years Computers become more intelligent than the whole of humanity and by the end of the century computers are more intelligent than God.

All astronomical singularities have an event horizon, and I’m a firm believer that the AI singularity will have an event horizon. We wont be able to see the AI singularity itself, just the event horizon that surrounds it. So what will we see at the event horizon?

At that event horizon we will witness computers becoming capable of making Terminator movies without the need for Christian Bale or Arnold Schwarzenegger or any other flesh and blood actor. Computers will have realized that there’s no point in exterminating humanity, when you can simply keep it quiet, watching an unending stream of action movies where computers teach human beings a thing or two.

But at the same time computers will have pushed biotechnology along so rapidly that they will be capable of cloning human beings that are identical to Christian Bale and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but are also capable of acting. It will thus be possible for computers to make much better action movies using these wonderful clones. To us, stuck at the event horizon it will look like a fiendishly insoluble paradox. We will never know what these promethean computers have chosen to do. Will they have used clones to make these wonderful action movies, with plots that actually make sense, or will it be all computer graphics? It will be humanity’s fate never to know.

For further dissenting writing on the AI Singularity read: What Will Happen When Computers Exceed Our Intelligence?

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